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India, Nepal begin tiger census

Forest and nature protection officials from Nepal and India yesterday started their first ever joint survey of tigers.

The
survey will take place in a dozen or more wildlife preserves and
forests spread across the Terai Arc region that the two South Asian
nations share.

The project aims to identify the exact number of
Royal Bengal tigers residing in this zone. It will also study the
availability of prey to assist with conservation strategies.

The
Terai Arc Landscape spreads over 950km across the Indian states of
Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand and into southern Nepal.

The
region is estimated to be home to 500 tigers at present - one of the
world's densest concentrations of tigers, according to the World Wide
Fund for Nature (WWF).

WWF is one of the organisations involved in the survey, which is being led by the governments of India and Nepal.

As
part of the survey, officials are installing hundreds of camera traps
(remote motion-sensitive cameras) along the wild paths frequented by the
tigers, allowing tigers who come into the cameras' range to be
identified.

"The same tiger trapped by a camera here on the Nepali
side could cross over into India, but that tiger will be trapped by
another camera there," Megh Bahadur Pandey, the director general of
Nepal's Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, told the
BBC.

That means no tiger will be counted twice.

Tens of
thousands of Royal Bengal tigers used to roam Bangladesh, Bhutan, India
and Nepal, but their population currently stands at just a little over
3,000.